August 29th, 2022 (1)
“What are your current reading and writing habits? And, how would you like to change?”
As of now, my current reading habits are not as good as they used to be since before the pandemic, I used to be an avid reader and had at least one book at hand every time so when I got bored, I could just read. But during the pandemic, not being able to use my school’s library and get new books to read halted my reading. And currently, I am trying to get back into reading but unfortunately, I can’t find any books that interest me like the ones I have read before. I would like to change this by looking for recommendations of books and hopefully begin to read again. For my current writing habits, it’s the same as it used to be in highschool and I feel like it hasn’t really progressed in a while. I would like to change this by getting to read more essays and excerpts from famous writers and analyzing them so I can pick up on their habits and hopefully develop and understand how to write a more complex essay to share my ideas properly.
August 29th, 2022 (2)
NFG Chapter 25: Writing as Inquiry
While reading, some interesting ideas I read were that you should start off with a question when writing. In the text, it says how entering writing with a question about something you don’t know can help expand your overall knowledge of what you already knew and the best questions are the questions that allow for you to think. Doing this can help your writing to be able to enter up onto larger conversations and reach a more broader audience. Another point that I picked up on was how to keep the habit of writing and some of the ways mentioned were through a blog or a journal. Through blogs, it allows writers to post their ideas and explore different topics on the internet and show how others tackle the same questions you have. Having the opinions and ideas of other people on the internet will help you expand your own thoughts and can allow for more astute analysis in the future. But, keep in mind that most blogs aren’t authoritative research sources. Through journals, you can record your observations, thoughts, ideas, and more since it will only be seen by you. It can be useful when trying to come up with articulate questions and speculations and help in the development of your writing.
August 29th, 2022 (3)
Joan Didion – Why I Write
While first reading Joan Didion’s Why I Write, it came across to me as very abstract and difficult to understand what exactly Didion wanted the reader to know, but after re-reading it, one quote stands out to me to what Didion wanted to say to the reader. “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences.” While analyzing this sentence, it tells us that writing has a power to be able to show the writer’s thoughts and ideas, and similar to this, would be in the same way people take photos. People change angles and perspectives to make their photo show the story they want their viewers to see. And the same goes for writing. Being able to pick apart sentences and change certain words, punctuations, meanings, structure, etc. Each and every decision you make all matters on how you want to portray what you are saying. It’s this “picture” that leads you on how to write and what Didion says expresses this perfectly. “It tells you. You don’t tell it”.
September 6th, 2022 (4)
“What fairy tale would you like to explore?”
One fairy tale that I would like to explore would be Cinderella because in sports media, this story is used a lot to refer to a team’s situation if they have been on the rise and gained a lot of attention because of their situation. Another reason why I would like to explore the story of Cinderella is because most of us only know Disney’s version of the story and it was made very tame for children, but when I listen to youtube videos on the original retellings of the story, they usually say that it’s a horrific story compared to the one that everyone knows. Another story that I would like to explore would be Puss in Boots because like Cinderella, I only know the movie version in which the character of Puss appears in Shrek and his own movie, but I want to know the original story and what the movies took the from the original story and what they left out because in most movie retellings, they leave out certain parts of the story that is graphic so that it can be made into a marketable movie for children and families.
September 8th, 2022 (5)
Shitty First Drafts (Anne Lammott)
After reading Anne Lammott’s “Shitty First Drafts”, I was first humored by what she had to say about writing first drafts because I found it very similar to myself, in which I would just stare and not be able to write anything for the first couple of minutes or even hours. I enjoyed how honest the author was about her experiences on writing first drafts and that even at higher levels of writing, people still go through the stress of a first draft. One thing I found interesting and learned from in this text was the process of writing the first draft with Lammott saying how she would just write without restraints just letting her fingers move and writing intros pages long despite her page limit on her food reviews. Reading this, I realized that even if you don’t like what you’re writing, it’s always best to write your thoughts down instead of having nothing written at all. She also goes on to say how she edited her first draft with the quote “The next day, I’d sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out everything I possibly could.” It’s motivating to see how someone who’s reached the peak of their world still has to struggle with the same problems that I do when I write.
September 13th, 2022 (6)
NFG Considering the Rhetorical Situation (Pg. 27)
While reading this page, some important ideas I picked up on when I start to read or edit another person’s paper is what is their purpose, who is their audience, what is the genre, what is the author’s stance, and what is the medium and how does it affect me. Using these ideas, it will be very useful for me to understand the situation for which the paper is written and how their claims might be focused around a certain audience, place or genre. It’s very important to understand and identify these concepts because it can lead you to have a better understanding of why the paper was written in a certain way or why it might have biased towards one or another community of people. Another important idea I picked up on was focused around the purpose idea because it brings up interesting ideas like is the author’s purpose to entertain, inform, or persuade? Also, what was the reader’s purpose of reading the text? Using these concepts, it allows for us to identify what genre the paper is (Informative, Argumentative, Entertainment) and even what medium this might be on since informative texts tend to be on websites or newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, etc, and entertainment texts are on mediums like Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram.
September 15th, 2022 (7)
NFG Ch.3 Summarizing
While reading this chapter, one major idea I read was how important summarizing is and how to do so. In the text, the author states that summarizing is “an essential academic skill, a way to incorporate the ideas of others into your own writing”. We then get some of the guidelines of how to summarize a text properly which include reading the text carefully, stating the main points concisely and accurately, using signal phrases to distinguish between what the author says and what we say, and using quotes sparingly. Another major topic brought up in the chapter was how to respond to your summarization to make sure you understand and engage with the ideas. Some ways we can decide to respond to the summarization is to take a position on the claims mentioned in the text, analyze what the text says, or reflect on it. Some of the key points of a summary and response essay are including a concise summary of what you are reading, an explicit response, and support for your response. Some ways you can organize a summary and response essay is by doing a summary followed by a response, or, an introduction and thesis, followed by point-by-point summary and response.
September 20th, 2022 (8)
Irene Morstan Essay in NFG
While I was reading Irene Morstan essay “They’ll See How Beautiful I Am”: “I, Too” and the Harlem Renaissance”, what immediately stood out to me was how she used the format of summary and response with an argumentative genre to get her point across (more specifically the introduction and thesis, then point-by-point summary and response). In her essay, she focuses on the poem of Langston Hueges “I, Too” and other writings to get her point across that black people and their literature are a valuable part of the American identity. The text she uses also brings up another side to her claim, which not only makes the essay more interesting, it makes the essay less biased and more credible since she is willing to bring up ideas that go against her claims to back up and solidify what her claim is. One thing I had trouble with while reading Morstan’s essay was being able to identify certain points such as the author’s claim because while it was mentioned in the intro, it wasn’t as clearly stated as it was in her conclusion.
September 22nd, 2022 (9)
Purdue OWL MLA Formatting
After reading the Purdue OWL MLA Formatting pages, one important thing that I learned that I didn’t really know how to do before was how to cite the authors in the Works Cited page. First you must list the entries alphabetically by the authors last name, and their names must be written last name, first name and middle name or initial if necessary. Some specifics are applied to titles since we do not list titles like Dr., Sir, Saint, etc and degrees like PhD, MA, DDS, etc; but we do include suffixes like Jr. or the II. For multiple works that are only by one author, we must order the entries alphabetically by title, and use three hyphens in place of the authors name for every entry after the first. When an author or collection editor appears both as the sole author of a text and as the first author of a group, we list solo-author entries first. For works with no author, we alphabetize these works with their title, which is a shortened version of the title in the parenthetical citations in your paper. Learning these facts was informative and will definitely help me in my future work.
October 6th, 2022 (10)
NFG Ch. 30 Getting Response and Revising
After reading the NFG chapter, one piece of information that I found interesting and helpful was the process of revising and rewriting your draft after getting a response from your audience/reader. Starting off with revising, it says for first give yourself time to revise and allow yourself to see the big picture of your essay. Then revise to sharpen your focus by examining your thesis and make sure it matches the purpose of our essay as we understand it, and make sure that each supporting paragraph backs up your main point. After checking that everything in your essay makes sense, we must then revise to strengthen the argument, improve the organization, and revise again for clarity to make sure it still makes sense. Then for rewriting, you can experiment with different ideas such as rewriting from a different point of view, for a different audience, in a different tone, and in a different genre or medium. Doing this allows us to see and identify the best ways to achieve our purpose in the text, be able to reach our intended audience, and be able to convey our stance in our text.
October 11th, 2022 (11)
NFG Ch. 17 Literary Analysis
After reading the NFG chapter, one major writing technique that I got more clarity on was how to identify and properly write a literary analysis. To identify a literary analysis, some of the key features we must look out for are being able to identify an arguable thesis, paying careful attention to the language of the text and the patterns or themes that are seen, a clear interpretation of the text, and seeing whether or not the text follows MLA format. To write a literary analysis, we must first consider the rhetorical situation (purpose, audience, stance, media/design) and generate ideas based on what we want to analyze within the text. After identifying what we want our analysis to focus around, we then have to read the work over and over again until we have a clear picture of what it’s telling us and compose a strong thesis that is specific and open for discussion. We then read the text carefully once more and find evidence to support our interpretation of the text. We then cite and document the sources properly and finally format the essay using the MLA format.
October 13th, 2022 (12)
Exploratory Essay Post-Essay Reflection
After finishing and rereading my Exploratory essay, the genre that I was going for when I started to write my essay was an exploration-argumentative essay that focuses around the idea of how the story of Cinderella is related to the world of basketball. Through this genre, it allowed for me to explore a lot of content that I could use within the essay since it’s an exploratory essay, but it also had to relate back to the overall story of a fairytale. This genre of writing had a little restriction as to how it was formatted since we had to follow a source-by-source style structure before choosing what we were to write about. The purpose of my essay was to explore the idea of the Cinderella story and Basketball and argue how both of these topics are related to each other. I believe that I was able to accomplish what I was aiming for since I was able to mention credible sources and bring up my own ideas that helped to cement my purpose. When writing my essay, the intended audience that I was writing for was my peers and teacher since they would be the only ones reading my essay, but other factors that I included for the people reading my essay were for those who knew a lot and didn’t know much about college basketball and the terminology used within it and for those who were interested or had read the story of Cinderella. After reviewing the course learning outcomes, some of the outcomes that I feel I was able to achieve during the period of my writing this essay was being able to practice and implement systematic application of citation conventions throughout my essay since I was constantly citing many different authors and works to argue and implement my claim. Another course learning outcome I feel I was able to achieve during the period of this essay was being able to locate research sources in the school database/archives or the internet and be able to evaluate them for credibility because during the research part of this essay, we had learned how to maneuver through our schools database and use advanced searches that used keywords to describe our topic that allowed us to find critical sources that were used throughout my essay. Also, being able to identify whether or not a source was credible or not was of great help because in the essay, I used specific terminology that only people within the pro/college sports scene would understand, so being able to figure out the author’s credentials was helpful to find my sources. Overall, this type of essay was very new to me since I got the freedom to explore a topic/idea that I have a lot of knowledge on and try to interpret it into one of the stories that we had read during class.
October 20th, 2022 (13)
NFG Ch. 46 Finding Sources (Pgs. 445-450)
After reading this NFG chapter, the one major piece of information that I learned was how to evaluate and group different kinds of sources that will be used in our future essays. For primary sources, they tend to be historical documents, literary works, eyewitness accounts, original research you do through interviews, observation, etc. Secondary sources are identified as scholarly books and articles, reviews, biographies, textbooks, and other works that interpret or discuss primary sources. A good idea they bring up in the chapter is how whether or not a work is considered primary or secondary sometimes depends on our topic and purpose. They give a very helpful example which states “If you’re analyzing a poem, a critic’s article interpreting the poem is a secondary source — but if you’re investigating that critic’s work, the article would be a primary source for your own study and interpretation.” If we were to analyze a fairy tale’s underlying meaning, then an article from someone like Bruno Bettelhiem would be a secondary source, but if we were to instead talk and analyze Bettelhiem’s work, then his articles would be the primary source. Finding out the difference between the two was important since we need to find 4 secondary sources and 2 primary sources for our upcoming essay.
November 11th, 2022 (14)
RCA Post-Essay Reflection
After finishing and reviewing my RCA essay, when I first started to write this essay, the genre I had in mind was an analytical argumentative essay that focused on the idea on whether or not the story of Bluebeard can be connected back to the topic of domestic abuse in marriages. The purpose of this essay was to first to connect the story of Bluebeard back to domestic abuse cases through the primary source of “Bluebeard” by Charles Perrault and secondary sources that analyze the situation in which the wife in the story was put in during her marriage to Bluebeard, and sources that touched on real-life experiences and the similarities between the two topics. The other purpose was to inform the audience of the terrible things that happen to people in domestic violence situations as seen within the story and have a call-to-action moment at the end of the essay so the audience can be more motivated and help those who might be in similar situations. The audience that I had in mind while writing this essay were first my peers and teacher since they would be the ones reading and reviewing my essay, but the intended audience other than them were for people who know somebody or is in a domestic abuse situation and someone who doesn’t know much about what happens in a domestic abuse situation since some people label people who are victims as stupid since they could just “leave” their situation. After reviewing my essay, some of the course learning outcomes I feel I was able to achieve through the process of this essay was composing texts that integrate my stance and language with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation. I feel I was able to touch upon this learning outcome because throughout the essay, I had to be creative with what sources I used and how I interpreted them to become evidence that backs up my claims since most of the articles and text on the city database didn’t apply to my topic and I found it really difficult to relate the two topics together, but by using strategies such as interpretation, critical analysis, and argumentation, I was able to use sources that didn’t really touch on the story of Bluebeard and apply that to my overall argument. Another learning outcome I feel I was able to achieve was locating research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. Like the exploratory essay, I used the city database to try and find credible sources, but this time, it was much more difficult as there weren’t as many articles talking on both the topic of domestic abuse and the story of Bluebeard. I was able to instead search on google scholar for more options and found very credible sources from government official websites that touched on the process of domestic abuse which I used to debate and analyze the situation that Bluebeard’s wife was in. Overall, this essay was much more complex than my last one since it had more restrictions on what we could and couldn’t do so it made it harder for my ideas to come to light, but it was a very interesting assignment overall.
November 22nd, 2022 (15)
NFG Ch. 5-7
After reading this NFG chapter, two pieces of information that I was able to get out of it were how to identify and achieve your purpose and how to identify your genre. To try and identify your purpose, we have to ask ourselves what is the primary purpose of our essay? Is it to entertain, inform, persuade, or demonstrate writing ability? Then to think about our purpose, we have to think about the audience and what we want them to think, feel, do, etc. Think about what the writing task is asking us to do, identify it, and think of ways which are best to achieve the purpose we have in mind. To identify our genre, we must first ask if the situation calls for a certain type of genre, like a letter, report, or proposal. Most academic assignments specify the genre of “take a position” or “analyze the text”. Afterwards, we must think about the genre and ask ourselves, how does the genre affect what content that can be used, how the genre might call for any specific strategies, how the genre might require a certain organization or format, how the genre affects the tone, and much more.
November 29th, 2022 (16)
NFG Ch. 8-9
After reading the NFG chapter, the two pieces of information I learned was how to identify and think about your stance, and how to think about the media/design you use in your essay. To identify your stance, you first ask yourself, What is your attitude toward your topic? Your stance on the topic may be affected by who your audience is, so communicating might be different compared to how it would be to someone you might know. To think about your stance, you have to ask yourself how you might perceive your stance if you were the audience, how it will be reflected in your tone, and how it relates back to the purpose of your writing. When thinking about what media/design you might want to use to get your message to the write audience, you have to ask yourself how what medium you’re using is affecting your organization and strategies, how it affects what type of language you use, and how different types of media like photos, videos, and audio all affect how the audience portrays your purpose.
